Moses Massaquoi, who directed Liberia’s case-management system during the Ebola outbreak and today is the senior adviser for management system for covid-19, told me, “I think we are better off because we went through Ebola. This disease is different, of course, but the structure is there—the incident-management system, the protocols, the guidelines. I imagine countries in Africa that didn’t have that experience are going through difficult times.” The East African countries that are, so far, outperforming the global West benefitted from Ebola preparations as well. Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and Uganda all border the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and were forced to respond to its Ebola outbreak in 2018. Each country already has rapid-response teams, trained contact tracers, logistics routes, and other public-health tools and protocols in place, which they have adapted to respond to the coronavirus. That level of cöordination—indeed, of practice—also makes a difference. “We’ve seen that in an epidemic, one day can mean a lot,” Nsanzimana, of the Rwanda Biomedical Center, told me.
